Meet the Warriors Video

Yoga Garden teacher Kazue Norose briefly introduces the Warrior Family of poses (Virabhadrasana I, II, III). A lot of people overlook these poses because the shapes seem so basic and simple. This video shows some of the fine details that go into t...Read the full transcript »

This is Patrick from Yoga Garden and on the screen, this is Kazue, one of our teachers. Today we are going to explore a set of poses, Warrior 1, Warrior 2 and Warrior 3. These poses are all related to kind of a family. There is a picture I have found of some kalari warriors from India. You can see they are doing the same forms we are going to practice today, try to attain the spheres of life and energy. Let's think of Warrior 2 first and it is easiest one to start with. A great thing about these poses is that they are so closely related if you learn the basics of one, they imply to all three. Just like building a house, when you start a standing yoga pose you need to think about your foundations first. You can see here the heels are aligned. The back foot has some parching, the front foot and the thighs are also very active and the key point to all of these poses is you want to make sure that your knee is right above the ankle. Don’t compromise on this. Even as you move with your variation, this knee stay stable. Now that the foundation is setup, we can move to the hips. Right now the pelvis and hips are too far back and in this way this it is too forward. Moving your pelvis forward and back will give too much stress on the back. So, you want to make sure that the pelvis right in the center and the weight is fifty-fifty between both foots. Moving up to the shoulders now, as with all standing poses, you don’t want to pinch shoulders, you want that the deep back muscles take care of this. The shoulders open and roll back. There should be a lot of space between shoulders up here.. All of the things we just talked about still apply in Proud Warrior 1. The only difference is in the hips. In Warrior 2, the hips are open, the belly button facing front. In this version the hips are closed. So, your front leg is actually going to be sinking back into the body. The bone is going to the pelvic socket. You can see here a little better. The muscle power for this action has to come from both the left and the right butt, exact the same time, kind of a push and pull. Like before we are not pinching the shoulders up near the ears, using the lower back muscles we are going to lift up float open and generally create a lot of space. This will bring the pose a life. As before you don’t want the hips to be tilted too far back or too far forward. When you align the hips right in the center, your spine is going to open up and lengthen. You can see here a gentle S curve, you see what we are trying to get. All three versions of this pose have the same action. They are lifting and lengthening the spine and sinking down. Proud Warrior 1 is very natural to progress into Warrior 3. Body weight comes forward, back leg floats up and body becomes parallel. Of the warrior family this one is definitely kind of the stringe that only comes around, but it's still related, with the focus of the pose being correct alignment of the hips. Getting into this pose is often tricky for people. It is causing the center of mass, do you see that? The arms and upper body went first and the center of mass is last. This is the recipe for adjustability. A much better is to do move the Center of Mass first. The hips move over the leg and then back leg and torso coming into the pose. So, you know the warrior family pretty well now. Can you guess what's wrong with these hips? It is pretty difficult to self correct at Warrior 3. It is hard to feel what is out of line and out of lack, but a great way to check yourself is to put a gasho or a prayer position on your back. This will give you a kind of some biofeedback. As you move into the pose, press the hands to the back. This will help you find that S curve we are talking about before and give you a good sense of what's out of line. These poses will bring a lot of vitality to your life. Enjoy and put it to a great use.

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